Beading the Sun

Happy Independence Day! With all the recent days of sunshine and heat, I thought it was a great time to tell you about my most recent project. It came to be with inspiration from three different directions.

I received a comment from Karen to a recent post about my mailing tape beading technique (click here to link to that post):

“Let us know when you will be teaching another class in adding beads to a quilt.  I have tons of beads and need some ideas on how to use them on a quilt.”

This got me to thinking that I haven’t done any beading classes for a long time. Then the ThreadBenders group chose a small challenge theme of “Sun”. This challenge had very few rules – “make a quilt with a sun on it” 🌞 . On top of that I was excited about the wonderful way Clara embellished a wall hanging with fasteners (click here to read it). This all came together in my brain and I jumped right in to my beaded sun quilt.

So where did I begin? Well – I needed to have a base for my beading and it needed to contain the sun. I chose a wonderful, bright hand-dyed fabric for the sun and a beautiful blue hand-dyed fabric for the sky. These were fat quarters from my stash and the colors alone made me want to continue. I drew an appropriately sized 1/4 sun (it seemed to fit best) on a piece of freezer paper, cut it out, ironed the shiny side to the sun fabric, and layered it with the sky. Then I stitched along the outside of the paper, through both layers.

all the way around.

The paper was peeled away and the excess sun fabric was trimmed next to the stitching, ala my raw-edged Repliqué technique.

Leaving me a wonderful top to embellish.

I trimmed the sky fabric away from behind the sun to reduce bulk (and who would want to waste any of that beautiful fabric?)

During this entire process I was contemplating where and how to embellish. Stay tuned to next week’s post to see where I went from there!